by Isaac Asimov
“Ummm. Think it’ll work?”
“Not for long.”
Ideology was an uncertain cement. Even religious fervor could not glue an empire together for long. Either force could drive formation of an empire, but they could not hold against greater, steady tides–principally, economics.
“How about the war in the Orion Zone?”
“Nobody mentioned it.”
“Think we’ve got war figured right in the equations?” Yugo had a knack for suddenly putting his finger on what was bothering Hari.
“No. War was an overesteemed element in history.”
Certainly war often gained center stage; no one continued to read a beautiful poem when a fist fight broke out nearby. But fist fights did not last, either. Further, they joggled the elbows of those trying to make a living. To engineers and traders alike, war did not pay. So why did wars break out now, with all the economic weight of the Empire against them?
“Wars are simple. But we’re missing something basic–I can feel it.”
“We’ve based the matrices on all that historical data Dors dug out,” Yugo said a bit defensively. “That’s solid.”
“I don’t doubt it. Still...”
“Look, we’ve got over twelve thousand years of hard facts. I built the model on that.”
“I have a feeling what we’re missing isn’t subtle.”
Most collapses were not from abstruse causes. In the early days of Empire consolidation, local minor sovereignties flourished, then died. There were recurrent themes in their histories.
Again and again, star-spanning realms collapsed under the weight of excessive taxation. Sometimes the taxes supported mercenary armies which defended against neighbors, or which simply kept domestic order against centrifugal forces. Whatever the ostensible cause of taxes, soon enough the great cities became depopulated, as people fled the tax collectors, seeking “rural peace.”
But why did they do that spontaneously?
“People.” Hari sat up suddenly. “That’s what we’re missing.”
“Huh? You proved yourself–remember? the Reductionist Theorem?–that individuals don’t matter.”
“They don’t. But people do. Our coupled equations describe them in the mass, but we don’t know the critical drivers.”
“That’s all hidden, down in the data.”
“Maybe not. What if we were big spiders, instead of primates? Would psychohistory look the same?”
Yugo frowned. “Well... if the data were the same...”
“Data on trade, wars, population statistics? It wouldn’t matter whether we were counting spiders instead of people?”
Yugo shook his head, his face clouding, unwilling to concede a point that might topple years of work. “It’s gotta be there.”
“Your coming in here to get details of what the rich and famous do at their revels–where’s that in the equations?”
Yugo’s mouth twisted, irked now. “That stuff, it doesn’t matter.”
“Who says?”
“Well, history–”
“Is written by the winners, true enough. But how do the great generals get men and women to march through freezing mud? When won’t they march?”
“Nobody knows.”
“We need to know. Or rather, the equations do.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“Go to the historians?”
Hari laughed. He shared Dors’ contempt for most of her profession. The current fashion in the study of the past was a matter of taste, not data.
He had once thought that history was simply a matter of grubbing in musty cyberfiles. Then, if Dors would show him how to track down data–whether encoded in ancient ferrite cylinders or polymer blocks or strandware–then he would have a firm basis for mathematics. Didn’t Dors and other historians simply add one more brick of knowledge to an ever-growing monument?
The current style, though, was to marshal the past into a preferred flavor. Factions fought over the antiquity, over “their” history vs. “ours.” Fringes flourished. The “spiral-centric” held that historical forces spread along spiral arms, whereas the “Hub-focused” maintained that the Galactic Center was the true mediating agency for causes, trends, movements, evolution. Technocrats contended with Naturals, who felt that innate human qualities drove change.
Among myriad facts and footnotes, specialists saw present politics mirrored in the past. As the present fractured and transfigured, there seemed no point of reference outside history itself–an unreliable platform indeed, especially when one realized how many mysterious gaps there were in the records. All this seemed to Hari to be more fashion than foundation. There was no uncontested past.
What contained the centrifugal forces of relativism–let me have my viewpoint and you can have yours–was an arena of broad agreement. Most people generally held that the Empire was good, overall. That the long periods of stasis had been the best times, for change always cost someone. That above the competing throng, through the factions shouting what were essentially family stories at each other, there was worth in comprehending where humanity had passed, what it had done.
But there agreement stopped. Few seemed concerned with where humanity, or even the Empire, was going. He had come to suspect that the subject was ignored, in favor of your-history-against-mine, because most historians unconsciously dreaded the future. They sensed the decline in their souls and knew that over the horizon lay not yet another shift-then-stasis but a collapse.
“So what do we do?” Hari realized that Yugo had said this twice now. He had drifted off into reverie.
“I … don’t know.”
“Add another term for basic instincts?”
Hari shook his head. “People don’t run on instinct. But they do behave like people–like primates, I suppose.”
“So... we should look into that?”
Hari threw up his hands. “I confess. I feel that this line of logic is leading somewhere–but I can’t see the end of it.”
Yugo nodded, grinned. “It’ll come out when it’s ripe.”
“Thanks. I’m not the best of collaborators, I know. Too moody.”
“Hey, never mind. Gotta think out loud sometimes, is all.”
“Sometimes I’m not sure I’m thinking at all.”
“Lemme show you the latest, huh?” Yugo liked to parade his inventions, and Hari sat back as Yugo accessed the office holo and patterns appeared in midair. Equations hung in space, 30-stacked and each term color-coded.
So many! They reminded Hari of birds, flocking in great banks.
Psychohistory was basically a vast set of interlocked equations, following the variables of history. It was impossible to change one and not vary any other. Alter population and trade changed, along with modes of entertainment, sexual mores, and a hundred other factors.
Some were undoubtedly unimportant, but which? History was a bottomless quarry of factoids, meaningless without some way of winnowing the hail of particulars. That was the essential first task of any theory of history–to find the deep variables.
“Post-diction rates–presto!” Yugo said, his hand computer suspending in air 30 graphs, elegantly arrayed. “Economic indices, variable-families, the works.”
“What eras?” Hari asked.
“Third millennia to seventh, G. E.”
The multidimensional surfaces representing economic variables were like twisted bottles filled with–as Yugo time-stepped them–sloshing fluids. The liquids of yellow and amber and virulent red flowed around and through each other in a supple, slow dance. Hari was perpetually amazed at how beauty arose in the most unlikely ways from mathematics. Yugo had plotted abstruse econometric quantities, yet in the gravid sway of centuries they made delicate arabesques.
“Surprisingly good agreement,” Hari allowed. The yellow surfaces of historical data merged cleanly with the other color skins, fluids finding curved levels. “And covering four millennia! No infinities?”
�
��That new renormalization scheme blotted them out.”
“Excellent! The middle Galactic Era data is the most solid, too, correct?”
“Yeah. The politicians got into the act after the seventh millennium. Dors is helpin’ me filter out the garbage.”
Hari admired the graceful blending of colors, ancient wine in transfinite bottles.
The psychohistorical rates linked together strongly. History was not at all like a sturdy steel edifice rigidly spanning time; it rather more resembled a rope bridge, groaning and flexing with every footfall. This “strong coupling dynamic” led to resonances in the equations, wild fluctuations, even infinities. Yet nothing really went infinite in reality, so the equations had to be fixed. Hari and Yugo had spent many years eliminating ugly infinites. Maybe their goal was in sight.
“How do the results look if you simply run the equations forward, past the seventh millennium?” Hari asked.
“Oscillations build up,” Yugo admitted.
Feedback loops were scarcely new. Hari knew the general theorem, ancient beyond measure: If all variables in a system are tightly coupled, and you can change one of them precisely and broadly, then you can indirectly control all of them. The system could be guided to an exact outcome through its myriad internal feedback loops. Spontaneously, the system ordered itself–and obeyed.
History, of course, obeyed no one. But for eras such as the fourth to seventh millennium, somehow the equations got matters right. Psychohistory could “post-dict” history.
In truly complex systems, how adjustments occur lay beyond the human complexity horizon, beyond knowing–and most important, not worth knowing.
But if the system went awry, somebody had to get down in the guts of it and find the trouble. “Any ideas? Clues?”
Yugo shrugged. “Look at this.”
The fluids lapped at the walls of the bottles. More warped volumes appeared, filled with brightly colored data-liquids. Hari watched as tides swept through the burnt-orange variable-space, driving answering waves in the purple layers nearby. Soon the entire holo showed furiously churning turbulence.
“So the equations fail,” Hari said.
“Yeah, big time, too. The grand cycles last about a hundred and twenty-five years. But smoothing out events shorter than eighty years gives a steady pattern. See–”
Hari watched turbulence build like a hurricane churning a multicolored ocean.
Yugo said, “That takes away scatter due to ‘generational styles,’ Dors calls it. I can take the Zones that consciously increased human lifespan. I time-step the equations forward, great–but then I run out of data. How come? I mine the history some, and it turns out those societies didn’t last long.”
Hari shook his head. “You’re sure? I’d imagine increasing the average age would bring a little wisdom into the picture.”
“Not so! I looked deeper and found that when the lifespan reached the social cycle time, usually about a hundred and ten Standard Years, instability rose. Whole planets had wars, depressions, general social illnesses.”
Hari frowned. “That effect–is it known?”
“Don’t think so.”
“This is why humans reached a barrier in improving their longevity? Society breaks down, ending the progress?”
“Yeah.”
Yugo wore a small, tight smile, by which Hari knew that he was rather proud of this result. “Growing irregularities, building to–chaos.”
This was the deep problem they had not mastered. “Damn!” Hari had a gut dislike of unpredictability.
Yugo gave Hari a crooked smile. “On that one, boss, I got no news.”
“Don’t worry,” Hari said cheerfully, though he didn’t feel it. “You’ve made good progress. Remember the adage–the Imperium wasn’t built in a day.”
“Yeah, but it seems to be fallin’ apart plenty fast.”
They seldom mentioned the deep-seated motivation for psychohistory: the pervasive anxiety that the Empire was declining, for reasons no one knew. There were theories aplenty, but none had predictive power. Hari hoped to supply that. Progress was infuriatingly slow.
Yugo was looking morose. Hari got up, came around the big desk, and gave Yugo a gentle slap on the back. “Cheer up! Publish this result.”
“Can I? We’ve got to keep psychohistory quiet.”
“Just group the data, then publish in a journal devoted to analytical history. Talk to Dors about selecting the journal.”
Yugo brightened. “I’ll write it up, show you–”
“No, leave me out of it. It’s your work.”
“Hey, you showed me how to set up the analysis, where–”
“It’s yours. Publish.”
“Well...”
Hari did not mention the fact that, now, anything published under his name would attract attention. A few might guess at the immensely larger theory lurking behind the simple lifespan-resonance effect. Best to keep a low profile.
When Yugo had gone back to work, Hari sat for a while and watched the squalls work through the data-fluids, still time-stepping in the air above his desk. Then he glanced at a favorite quotation of his, pointed out to him by Dors, given to him on a small, elegant ceramo-plaque:
Minimum force, applied at a cusp moment at the historical fulcrum, paves the path to a distant vision. Pursue only those immediate goals which serve the longest perspectives.
–Emperor Kamble’s 9th Oracle, Verse 17
“But suppose you can’t afford long perspectives?” he muttered, then went back to work.
7.
The next day he got an education in the realities of Imperial politics.
“You didn’t know the 3D scope was on you?” Yugo asked.
Hari watched the conversation with Lamurk replay on his office holo. He had fled to the University when the Imperial Specials started having trouble holding the media mob away from his apartment. They had called in reinforcements when they caught a team drilling an acoustic tap into the apartment from three layers above. Hari and Dors had gotten out with an escort through a maintenance grav drop.
“No, I didn’t. There was a lot going on.” He remembered his bodyguards accosting someone, checking and letting it pass. The 3D camera and acoustic tracker were so small that a media deputy could walk around with them under formal wear. Assassins used the same artful concealment. Bodyguards knew how to distinguish between the two.
Yugo said with Dahlite savvy, “Gotta watch ’em, you gonna play in those leagues.”
“I appreciate the concern,” Hari said dryly.
Dors tapped a finger to her lips. “I think you came over rather well.”
“I didn’t want to seem as though I were deliberately cutting up a majority leader from the High Council,” Hari said heatedly.
“But that’s what you were doin’,” Yugo said.
“I suppose, but at the time it seemed like polite... banter,” he finished lamely. Edited for 3D, it was a quick verbal Ping-Pong with razor blades instead of balls.
“But you topped him at every exchange,” Dors observed.
“I don’t even dislike him! He has done good things for the Empire.” He paused, thinking. “But it was... fun.”
“Maybe you do have a talent for this,” she said.
“I’d rather not.”
“I don’t think you have much choice,” Yugo said. “You’re gettin’ famous.”
“Fame is the accumulation of misunderstandings around a well-known name,” Dors said.
Hari smiled. “Well put.”
“It’s from Eldonian the Elder, the longest-lived emperor. The only one of his clan to die of old age.”
“Makes the point,” Yugo said. “You gotta expect some stories, gossip, mistakes.”
Hari shook his head angrily. “No! Look, we can’t let this extraneous matter distract us. Yugo, what about those bootleg personality constellations you ‘acquired’?”
“I’ve got ’em.”
“Machine translated? They will
run?”
“Yeah, but they take an awful lot of memory and running volume. I’ve tuned them some, but they need a bigger parallel-processing network than I can give them.”
Dors frowned. “I don’t like this. These aren’t just constellations, they’re sims.”
Hari nodded. “We’re doing research here, not trying to manufacture a superrace.”
Dors stood and paced energetically. “The most ancient of taboos is against sims. Even personality constellations obey rigid laws!”
“Of course, ancient history. But–”
“Prehistory.” Her nostrils flared. “The prohibitions go back so far, there are no records of how they started–undoubtedly, from some disastrous experiments well before the Shadow Age.”
“What’s that?” Yugo asked.
“The long time–we have no clear idea of how long it lasted, though certainly several millennia–before the Empire became coherent.”
“Back on Earth, you mean?” Yugo looked skeptical.
“Earth is more legend than fact. But yes, the taboo could go back that far.”
“These are hopelessly constricted sims,” Yugo said. “They don’t know anything about our time. One is a religious fanatic for some faith I never heard of. The other’s a smartass writer. No danger to anybody, except maybe themselves.”
Dors regarded Yugo suspiciously. “If they’re so narrow, why are they useful?”
“Because they can calibrate psychohistorical indices. We have modeling equations that depend on basic human perceptions. If we have a pre-ancient mind, even simmed, we can calibrate the missing constants in the rate equations.”
Dors snorted doubtfully. “I don’t follow the mathematics, but I know sims are dangerous.”
“Look, nobody savvy believes that stuff any more,” Yugo said. “Mathists have been running pseudo-sims for ages. Tiktoks–”
“Those are incomplete personalities, correct?” Dors asked severely.
“Well, yeah, but–”
“We could get into very big trouble if these sims are better, more versatile.”
